With The Steve safely tucked away in his corporate cocoon – safe from the looky-loo gazes of star-struck reporters -- I was now ready to sample the preparations of Caffe Mac’s finest. If one subscribes to the maxim that a restaurant can be most accurately judged by the relative freshness of its least fresh food (and one might not subscribe to this maxim, for I just made it up), then it stands to reason that buying plates of raw fish and vegetables might give one a pretty good idea of just how wonderful Caffe Mac really is.

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Here we go. First the sushi. There was not a large variety of fish in the refrigerated sushi case. As a result, the small collections of fish that were actually on display looked a bit lost and lonely. Nonetheless, the color of the salmon, tuna, yellowtail, et al appeared perfectly correct, so I settled on a familiar collection of maki and nigiri.

With an uncanny consistency, the sushi tasted fresh but bland. Professional food writers (I am not one of them) will describe proper ebi as being succulent and almost sweet. Unfortunately, the shrimp on my slab of sushi rice was, for a lack of a better term, “flat.” No sweetness, and not a hint of that perfect turgidity one experiences when biting into a perfectly prepared piece of shrimp. It almost seemed as if the shrimp had been treated with something from a spray can, some kind of neutralizing agent that locks fish in a permanent state of freshness but also robs it of all flavor.

My tobiko-themed pieces were equally disappointing. With trademark amounts of saltiness and crunchiness, one should be able to detect a single, miniscule tobiko egg on the tip of one’s tongue, and then toss it around like a hacky-sack—from molar to tongue, from molar to tongue--because that’s just how strong and rigid a good flying fish egg will be. Sadly, while Caffe Mac’s tobiko had all the structural integrity one would expect from a crunchy, high-quality roe, it had none of the saltiness.

And so it was to be with all the sushi. The hamachi roll: bland but inoffensive. The California roll: bland but inoffensive. The unagi roll: OK, this one was a bit offensive, because the chef went heavy with the teriyaki sauce on top.

My total sushi upshot? It was two steps above the packaged stuff one gets at the supermarket, but also three or four steps below the truly sublime sushi one gets at in Northern California finest fish bars. In other words: In the context of Asian-themed lunch cuisine, Caffe Mac’s sushi was fan-bloody-tastic compared to the Monosodium Ramenate we get from the Mac|life snack machine, and I would gladly give up 50 percent of my vacation days if a sushi bar of Caffe Mac’s caliber set up shop at my own corporate HQ.

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Dining only improved after the sushi, as my second course consisted of a hand-selected medley of salad fixings, with each element being both fresh and packed with flavor. As you can see from the accompanying photograph, I sourced an eclectic mixture of beans, cheeses, and tomatoes.

Let’s talk beans first. I went for garbanzos and what can only be described as “non-specific members of the legume family, green.” Perhaps I chose the green ones because they reminded me of pear Jelly-Bellies, I don’t know, but I can tell you that both the ‘banzos and greenies had none of that waxy-starchy pulpiness that crappy canned beans are famous for.

The cheese? High-quality and absolutely fresh. The mozzarella balls were soft, creamy, and perfectly coated in herbs. The hard cheese? I don’t know what kind it was—maybe Parmesan, maybe Romano, maybe even Asiago—but it certainly wasn’t the crap from the green can.

And finally we come to the tomatoes. This meal was consumed in early August, arguably a few weeks short of the prime heirloom harvest period, but the tomatoes were just as rich, meaty, and bursting with flavor as anything you would have found at your local Farmer’s Market. And don’t be alarmed by the pink-colored thing you see in the photo. That’s a slice of tomato, not a piece of sushi. It’s supposed to look that way.

All in all, my lunch at Caffe Mac was a revelation. Even the somewhat disappointing food was spectacular within the context of what’s available in the Mac|Life offices. I can’t wait to try Apple’s pizza – in the almost inconceivable event that I’m ever invited back.

Oh, and by the way, Caffe Mac was also home to a piece of technology that left me thoroughly mesmerized. To omit any discussion of it would be a crime. So let’s continue, shall we?

I am tired of hearing about fast-food. When I was busy dealing with some frigidaire parts. I had an awful disease at my stomach and I don't want to eat not even a little piece of this type of food. Fresh vegetables and fruits are the best.

After reading this article and all the comments and really thinking long and hard about everything, the ultimate and final result is that I'm now hungry. Thus, today, I've decided to eat a quality lunch, though almost certainly not at the same level as experienced by Mr. Phillips. -Scott Erickson in Beaverton, Oregon.

>>>>>>Jon, you are such a loser. >>>>>expierence your mind gettier sluggisher<<<<<<<<<<<<< It's humor you twit. What's next? Writing Johnathan Swift to decry his proposal for the Irish to eat their poor children if they were so hungry and suggesting that bean sprouts would be a welcome alternative? Great Article Jon and funny!

>> "It’s time for Steve to go middle America. Pork rinds. Bags and bags of them. That’s what The Steve needs."

Jon, you are such a loser.

You just know nothing about living healthy and I could imagine that you're the kind of guy who even has to base some parts of his idea of manhood on this stupid "eating much meat" thing.

I bet I would beat you in any physical discipline. now or in at most in a year even if you've been doing it for a long time. and if you think "physical" is not your thing then i hope you will sooner not later expierence your mind gettier sluggisher and see how your body is one unit.

i have to apologize for calling you a loser since this is in some imminent respect incorect.

i got upset.

knowledge and achievements in one area though doesn't give you the right to write such stupidities about food.

and i ain't even speaking for the damn pigs. i just want to put a little effort against propagation of willingly holding unaware what's good to eat.

you may be one beeing able to afford such eating behaviour but shifting something like heavy meat-eating away from norms towards luxury (not even has to be in the monetary sense but more in a sense of healthfulness and recognising impact of food on the organism) could result in a healthier earth.

Anton, thanks for the follow-up reply, and please don't ever regret speaking your mind. (That's my unsolicted advice, at least. I think as long as people actually attach their real names to what they write, then pretty much anything is fair game.)

As for the pork rind reference, I know what you're saying. One of my sisters teaches raw food preparation classes, and partly as a result of this, I'm pretty well-versed in how energy-inefficient a meat-biased diet can be. (Though, FWIW, I heard a very interesting story on NPR about a farmer/rancher who has an amazingly cunning and efficient system for nurturing/harvesting food and livestock at just the right times, in just the right mutually beneficial ways, as to have a near perpetual machine of energy-efficient food production.)

Regardless, the main point I'd like to make is that my entire "food review" was pretty much a humor gag (successful humor? you be the judge), and I wouldn't ascribe too much import or relevance to anything I wrote. I.e., I don't advocate that anyone eat a bunch of pork rinds.

One day you will grow up to be a real journalist who understands that getting the facts right lends credibility to your reporting. It's Cafe Macs, not Caffe Mac. All you had to do was look at the sign or your receipt.

(1) If you think the story was a piece of serious reportage that demands incontestable "credibility" then you need to look up the word irony, and ask yourself if you have any sense of it.

(2) Before the story was posted, various Apple sources (i.e, run-of-the-mill employees) told me the place was named either Caffe Mac or Caffe Macs. Their recollections varied. All sources were quick to point out the first part of the name has two Fs, but there was no consensus on whether the second part of the name has an S. The takeaway here? The takeaway is that the exact spelling of the name is so damn irrelevant to the daily comings and goings of "real life," not even Apple employees could definitively recall the exact spelling. Nonetheless, if we're to take any of their words to heart, it would seem the cafeteria name doesn't has a single F, as you claim.

(3) I didn't pay for my lunch, thus no receipt. Good point about the sign, though. Next time I'll keep my eyes open.

(4) If you're going to come at me heavy, attacking my journalistic bonafides with such aggression, then please have the integrity to use your real name and not hide behind a handle. If, say, I knew you were a real journalist with a real resume, I'd still think you're an asshole, but at least I would be a bit embarrased for not fact-checking even this most ludicrous of stories (and for you, I think, my embarrasment would be mission accomplished). But if I were to find you had no journalistic legs on which to stand, and were simply one of the 20 million or so people who use the Internet to lash out at others behind the protection of anonymity, then my only reaction would be pure satisfaction -- satisfaction in knowing that I'm right in my belief that a broad cross-section of Internet "social-media" users are inherently fucked.